NBC Olympic efforts fall well short of gold medal
Hope you’ve been enjoying these Olympics because, as you may have probably read, being at the mercy of NBC’s television coverage in the US has proven to be a relentless heartache.
Put simply, every marquee event in London of interest to an American audience, namely the big finals in swimming, gymnastics and track, have all been subject to the “look away now” treatment.
NBC have picked the wrong day and age to expect their viewers to maintain the asceticism of a Tibetan monk and wait until the spiritual fulfilment of the cleverly edited highlights show later in the evening.
With an average audience of well over 30 million during the first nine nights of the Games, I’ve lost this argument before it has begun. The network even expects to break even on their huge investment of almost €2b on exclusive rights for both Winter and Summer, a deal which was originally signed in 2003. Last summer, they paid nearly twice as much to extend through to 2020. “This secures the financial future for the next decade of the Olympic movement,” IOC President Jacques Rogge said back then. So yeah, they can do what they want. But it would alarm anyone accustomed to the quality coverage offered by RTE and, to a greater extent, the BBC that NBC could fall so short of their obligations to the viewer in order to maximise their prime time profits. They have been rightly panned for all their high profile errors. They started badly by assuming American viewers would have no interest in the moving commemoration of the July 7 bombings during the opening ceremony in London. The alarm bells really started to ring for me the following day when I had to watch the first Lochte/Phelps showdown on my phone. Things then came to a head a couple of days later when Missy Franklin’s historic win in the 100m backstroke was spoiled by a promo for the Today Show’s “interview with gold medallist Missy Franklin”.
As one media observer put it, NBC has a slick 21st century approach to covering the Olympics, placing all of its star-studded and technological might behind Team USA and the London Olympics. But they are banking on a 20th century payback, a model that used to generate billions of dollars when there was less technology available to the viewers at home. For better or worse, society has moved on and now we demand more for less. This shift in the broadcasting landscape is not exactly a shock development but these Games are already being viewed as a pivotal moment in the evolution away from traditional consumption of live sport. This weekend, I finally gave in and moved to the laptop full time, setting up my speakers and developing tolerance for the blurry imperfections of tunnelling and streaming. Had I not done so, the significance of the home team’s achievements on Saturday would have been diminished for me. On Sunday afternoon, I switched from a stream of Jimmy Magee and John Joe Nevin to the commercial-free BBC to do what so many people across the USA were struggling to do: catch the live feed of the 100m final. How ludicrous that on a day when most people are not at work, when the only other major sport on television was yet another day of baseball, while, in New York City at least, temperatures soared towards its inevitable stormy climax, you couldn’t turn on your television for one of the greatest sporting events imaginable.
If you had waited until that evening and hurdled past the various spoiler alerts on news and sports channels, you would have had to wait until well after 11pm to see Usain Bolt make history.
But it’s the manipulation which NBC engage in which is the most galling. Helplessly absorbed in the US women’s team gymnastics victory last Tuesday, I would find out the following day that the producers had created a fiction. The Russians had made a mess of it during the defining floor exercise but watching NBC, you’d never have known that. Instead you would have been gripped by what seemed to be a narrow win for the Americans. In reality, they were cruising. But in order for us to keep watching through the commercial breaks, the suspense was part of the package.
It’s all becoming clear now, this American love affair with gymnastics. Even Kieran Behan had half a page of the New York Times devoted to him the day before his participation.
The sport and all its baggage of swirling emotions is manna from heaven for NBC. Watching a teenage gymnast explode into tears like a Brooklyn fire hydrant has been their guilty pleasure since long before the advent of reality TV.
It’s just a pity that true reality is so hard to come by.
john.w.riordan@gmail.com Twitter: JohnWRiordan
